Twitter : A Goldmine for Recruitment Teams and Top Management

Going through the history of existence of Twitter, it’s been proved through various research & expert opinion that Twitter does play an important in the Professional world and companies cannot afford to ignore it in such competitive time. When we say “Professional world”, this post is more focused on the “Recruitment World”. Holding the fort of a Recruiter ,all of us have to agree that as a recruiter one has to keep an eye on the Market ,what’s happening around as, industry updates, skill mapping and find out more about the Hiring pattern of the competitors . Market Mapping is one such activity that a recruiter gets involved into. Am sure that you’re Recruitment Manager or people from Top Management would have asked for certain type of Data related to the competitors.

Following are some of the data that is usually asked for:

– The Headcount of a particular Competitor for certain skill
– Based on the high ask by the candidates, the managers often ask about the kind of Salary hike that’s being given by competitors.
– The number of employees hired during the quarter, attrition data, new clients added during a particular quarter, project scrapped, layoff etc.
– What is the payout percentage of Bonus/variable pay by competitors?

So now the question arises, where do we find these days. Going by our traditional source of Info we might well think about info from Naukri, Linkedin, calling up employees checking with them. But how many of us actually thought of just browsing Twitter once to find out these details via Twitter? So any guess how we do it?? It’s simple; all you have to do is follow your competitor on Twitter.

Following are some examples digged out of Twitter to make fellow recruiters aware of how much info can be fetched from a Social Media tool! As you are aware that major IT Companies in India have come out with their Quarterly Results. Here’s a consolidation of two Major IT companies!

Infosys:
As we speak, Infosys has 24616 followers on Twitter. Infosys has been very active on Twitter when it comes to sharing their Quarterly results. So will the tweets from this account give me some information, that might help the Top Management / Recruiters!!

TCS Twitter Account:TCS has 16852 followers on Twitter, and just like Infosys they too are very much active on Twitter. Following are some of the tweets that you might find very interesting:

– HR Head Ajoy: Variable Allowance for Q4 is 100%. Average hike for India is 8%
– VP HR Head: We are increasing our hiring in the US. The past year we have hired 1600 graduates in the United States. #results
– HR Head Ajoy: We should have a wage hike in India between 6-10% on average, 2-5% in the developed markets #results
– CEO Chandra: We have a huge bench now, training has been completed and ready for deployment. We’ve made offers to 45k freshers. #results
–All time high Gross addition: 70,400 employees; Total base 238,583 professionals’ #results

So, now you know that Average Hike the company will be offering, the Variable pay that will be given to the employees.

So do you think this information will help the recruiters, when they recruit from the market!! Well definitely, this gives a platform for the Recruitment team, based on which they can negotiate and hire from the external market. This does not mean that only recruiters get benefitted from it, in fact the candidates who are looking out can use this data and negotiate with their future employer.

Twitter is one such goldmine, if used in a right way can surely benefit you and your team. In this competitive world, such piece of vital information can make life easy and also helps you to plan accordingly. So the next time you get a request for such data, you very well know where to get it from 😉

PS: Unlike LinkedIn Groups, there is no moderation required to follow your competitors on twitter

My experience around hiring or finding competitor strength through Twitter yield practically zero result. I consider Twitter a great branding tool. Some people might use it for Customer support with some degree of success too.

Thanks Rajeev for the views. Basically different users have different feedback about Twitter. At times it depends on how we use it and for what purpose. No Doubt it is a great tool from Branding, but there are also a section of Recruiters who have managed to get a lot of mileage using Twitter (References / Leads for Resumes, Market Mapping etc)